Waking with alarm clocks on weekdays and sleeping til noon on weekends is a sign your sleep cycle is majorly messed up.
 • If there’s one thing everyone knows about sleep, it’s the concept of sleep debt, the idea that as you scrimp on hours spent in the sack your body accrues all that lost sleeping time, like a silent tally, and eventually makes you pay for it. To help pay back this sleep debt, many of us log extra hours of sleep on the weekends, sleeping in until 10, 11, or sometimes even noon or later (aaahh, the good days of college). A new study shows that this kind of sleeping pattern—where you wake up to an alarm, exhausted, during the week and sleep in on weekends—might actually be doing more harm than good. It’s been dubbed “social jet lag,” because, as TIME puts it, “your body’s basically shuttling back and forth between time zones each week while you’re becoming increasingly sleep-deprived.” Researchers found that those with different weekday and weekend sleeping habits were three times more likely to be overweight than those who woke up at the same time each day. Even scarier, the greater the difference between the rise-and-shine times, the fatter people were. While the research doesn’t prove a causal link between the two, it shows a definite association, and one worth exploring further. Your best bet? Get your 7 to 9 hours of sleep at the same time every night, abolish the alarm, and wake up feeling refreshed.
• Should doctors chart your BMI at checkups, in the same way they do your height, weight and blood pressure? New recommendations for tackling obesity encourage MDs to treat BMI as one of these critical vital signs, reports the Washington Post.
• Only 37.1 percent of young women and 15.6 percent of men in the 18-to-29 age range report using sunscreen. It’s no wonder half of young adults say they got sunburnt in the past year. What people probably don’t realize: “Each time a person burns, his or her risk of skin cancer goes up,” reports TIME.
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Don't waste money on store-bought bars again. These six recipes for homemade energy bars are cheap and endlessly versatile.
The key to making a delicious homemade energy bar is this: Fill it with things you love. There’s almost nothing that won’t work crammed inside one of these little guys. To adapt any of the recipes below, just keep the same proportions and swap one thing for another (i.e. a cup of peanuts for a cup of almonds, if almonds are more your bag). You’re looking for a good mix of carbs and grains, protein, and some sort of binder to hold it all together.
Ready to start experimenting? Here are my favorite recipes for yummy homemade energy bars. Consider them your starting point.
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Three pools, an indoor track, a giant gymnasium and more in 70,000 square feet
 A rendering of the new YMCA facility The first shovels broke ground this week on a new YMCA on North Eagle Road in Haverford. The gargantuan facility, which occupies the old Swell Bubble Gum Factory campus, is slated to open in September 2013. It will run 70,000 square feet and feature three swimming pools, wellness center, indoor track, gym (equipped with basketball and volleyball courts), and more, the Daily Times reports. Total price tag: $22.5 million.
The gym will offer free memberships to seventh graders in the community, a nudge to get kids hooked on fitness while they’re young (and, you know, bring their membership-paying parents along with them). Fifth grade representatives from nearby Lynnewood and Sacred Heart School received their membership certificates at the groundbreaking ceremony on Tuesday.
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Michael goes on business trip—and takes Gavin, Eric and the whole Fusion gang with him.
 Whatever the goal—making more money, quitting smoking, banishing the Kardashian family to another country—the thought of the payoff is always much easier than the plodding steps to get to it. The middle is always the challenge, whether that middle is the halfway point of a Dostoevsky novel or Jan Brady.
In this regard, boot camp is no different. Now, in week six, I find myself in that awful No Man’s Land of “not at the beginning” and “nowhere near the end,” as if I have been standing on the deck of the same ship forever, wondering if I am ever going to see land again. (Or if it’s sinking.) The start of all of this, while a complete bucket of ice water tossed over my psyche, at least shocked me into action and resolve. Now, firmly ensconced in a routine of bleary-eyed 6:30 a.m. weekly workouts and three others tossed in for good torture measure, I feel like I am literally stuck on the treadmill.
This week, I knew from the start, would be among my toughest, assuming I even made it this far. (And let’s face it—aren’t you surprised I have?) This was the week with the first of two business trips this month, meaning I would no longer have the Fusion Legion of Superheroes to bark orders and watch my form during lunges. Leaving the Fusion cocoon after Tuesday’s boot camp, I was facing no less than the future: Could I work out, as hard and as well, on my own as I do when under the sweaty thumb of Gavin & Co.?
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A high-altitude sleeping chamber is supposed to help the Olympic swimmer get ready for London this summer.
 For the uninitiated, this is Foreverware. • Okay, I’m going waaaaay back in the Obscure TV Archives here, but did anybody else ever watch that show, Eerie, Indiana, when they were kids? It was sort of like the Twilight Zone and took place in this town called Eerie, Indiana (duh) where all this cooky, made-for-kiddie-sci-fi stuff happens. Wikipedia informs me that Eerie lasted for only 13 episodes in the early ’90s, so chances are you missed it (in which case you really missed out because it was awesome). There was this one episode with this creepy family that never ages, and it turns out (spoiler alert!) that they sleep in these containers every night called Foreverware, sort of like giant Tupperware containers that keep them fresh and young, well, forever. I couldn’t help but think about Foreverware today when I heard about Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps’s bizarre high-altitude sleeping pod. He talks about it in a recent 60 Minutes interview (skip to 7:13), but declines to let the contraption be shown on video, adding another layer of Eerie-like mystery to the whole thing. The chamber is supposed to simulate high altitude in order to improve his endurance. Phelps describes it thusly: “Once I’m already in my room, I still have to open a door to get into my bed … It’s like a giant box. It’s like a boy in the bubble kind of thing.” So … yes. Michael Phelps is sleeping in Foreverware. You heard it here first, folks.
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The internet's a-buzz today about TIME magazine's provocative new issue showing a California woman breast-feeding her three-year-old son.
 Breastfeeding has a way of getting people all upset (see: Beyonce, nurse-ins). I think it’s because every new mother spends a lot of her time worrying about whether—and how—what she’s doing right now will impact her kid when he or she grows up. So when advice (solicited and otherwise) rains down from all directions, instructing you to do exactly what it is you’re not doing lest your kid turn into a psychopath, it’s no wonder moms get a smidge defensive.
TIME Magazine gently stoked poured gasoline on that fire today with the online release of its latest issue (it hits newsstands tomorrow), which shows 26-year-old California mom Jamie Lynne Grumet breastfeeding her three-year-old son. The article talks about a decades-old trend called attachment parenting, a technique touted in The Baby Book by Bill Sears, which was published in 1992. Its practices—baby-wearing, breastfeeding into toddlerhood, co-sleeping—stem from the underlying belief that babies who spend more time in their mother’s arms are more likely to turn into well-adjusted children and adults.
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Robin loves summer—too bad the season of bikinis and barbecues doesn't always love her back.
Summertime … and the livin’ is easy …
Summer summer summer time … time to sit back and unwind
Summer lovin’, had me a blast
(Those of you who know me realize that I just played “Sing Down” against myself (category: songs about summer), which is not totally unheard of. Those who don’t can just continue to think I’m insane, which isn’t totally unheard of either.)
Ahhhh … Summer. With Memorial Day Weekend just around the corner, everyone’s favorite season is almost upon us. To me, summer has always meant a whole host of good things:
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Stretch and release stress with Mom
 Celebrate mom a day early with this gentle and restorative yoga class on Saturday in King of Prussia. It’s not just for moms, either; men and children at least 13 years old are welcome, too. Release tension, stiffness and pain through a series of gentle stretching and deep breathing exercises. The class will end with relaxation and aromatherapy to the sounds of the ocean and healing Tibetan bells. Register by emailing heartcenteredwell@gmail.com or calling 610-992-0257. Learn more here.
$20, Saturday, May 12th, 10:30 a.m. to 12 p.m., HeartCentered Wellness, 580 Shoemaker Road, King of Prussia.
>> Have a health or fitness event you’d like to share with Be Well Philly readers? Email eleaman@phillymag.com with details.
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The Hollywood health and fitness gossip we're buzzing about this week
Someone Give Rachel Zoe a Cheeseburger Already. Celebrity stylist/E! reality star Rachel Zoe walked the red carpet at the Met Gala in New York this week. Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to hide her terrifying rail-like body under 72 yards of ivory fringe, reigniting whispers of an eating disorder. (Zoe refuted similar gossip in January 2010.) Eating disorder or not, when your chest is literally concave because there’s not enough meat on it, I think it’s time to eat a cheeseburger. Or, you know, 10. [Us Weekly]
Jessica Simpson’s Kid Is Enormous. At least Jessica Simpson now has physical proof as to why she seemed to gain a lot of weight during pregnancy: Her daughter is freaking huge! The proud new mom gave birth last week to baby girl Maxwell Drew Johnson, who clocked in at a whopping 9 pounds 13 ounces. [TIME]
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Warning: Just because Michael Jordan plays basketball with the flu doesn't mean you should.
• A health advocacy group is all up in arms over a new Gatorade ad, which features a circa-1997, flu-ridden Michael Jordan chugging Gatorade during a playoff basketball game. During that game, Wikipedia tells me, Jordan managed to put up 38 points, including a game-deciding three-pointer with 25 seconds left on the clock—all while battling a wicked stomach virus. The Public Health Advocacy Institute wants Gatorade to pull the ad because it “promotes engaging in vigorous physical activity while suffering from a very high fever, in Jordan’s case 103 degrees.” The nerve! (I think what’s shadier is the implication that the electrolyte-loaded sports drink can somehow magically rid a person of the flu in a manner of seconds, returning him or her to a superhuman-like state of health, but nobody asked me.) The group sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission asking them to take action, but officials there have yet to do anything about it. I’ve embedded the commercial in question below for your viewing pleasure. Thoughts?
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